The invention relates to a switch system for connecting a configurable number of ports together.
A switch has a number of resources, such as ports, buffers and internal busses. These resources will often depend on each other (e.g., the usage of some resources typically requires the availability of others). At a certain time, a buffer at each input port typically holds packets to several destinations, while packets to a certain destination are held in different input buffers. If an input buffer has a single read port, and this read port is busy feeding data to one output port, another output port might have to wait idle until the read port of the input buffer becomes available.
Different switch implementations can use different protocols (e.g., PCI Express, Ethernet, InfiniBand, etc.). It is desirable to manage packet transfers such that it is possible to transfer the highest number of packets at the same time irrespective of the protocol being used.
The present invention seeks to provide an adaptable switch system that is configurable to different protocols.